Note: This article was originally posted on November 17, 2020. The below is an excerpt. The full article can be found at builtin.
When the Portland-based footwear company Hilos launched its 3D-printed shoe line, it was doing something co-founder and CEO Elias Stahl said had never been done before. Sure, people were used to buying shoes online, but having those shoes tailored and customized to spec was uncharted territory.
So, before releasing the product into the wild, Hilos wanted to answer a fundamental question: Would users accept it?
In simplest terms, this is the question user acceptance testing (UAT) seeks to answer. Often the final phase of the software development cycle before a feature is released, user acceptance testing is a way to determine whether people will use a feature the way the product team intended. Are users engaged by it? Does it perform as designers expected? Has anything in the design landed outside the scope of users’ concerns?
“If you’re drilling down on something that is novel and innovative, it’s a cut-and-dry way to determine if this new or novel feature will be accepted by the majority of clients. If it is, how? If not, who is not accepting it and why?” Stahl said.
In the end, UAT is the process of finding out if a user actually wants or needs a feature.
While it is often conflated with other forms of user testing, most experts agree that user acceptance testing is a desirability check on a narrowly defined feature or piece of functionality.
“The easiest way to define user acceptance testing versus other types of testing is that, in the end, UAT is the process of finding out if a user actually wants or needs a feature,” explained Andrew Wachholz, a user experience design consultant at Designing4UX. “So, while usability tests may go well (people can use [the product] according to how we designed it) and functional tests may go well (we tried to break it, and it didn’t break), if the user rejects the feature when it is available to them, UAT has failed.”
Devising an effective approach to user acceptance testing depends on the maturity and resources of your company, the scope and type of release, your intended audience and your risk tolerance.
We spoke with founders, product managers and UX consultants across the tech community to lay out a strategic framework for planning and conducting user acceptance testing.
7 Steps to User Acceptance Testing
- Determine if it’s worth it.
- Scope and plan.
- Write acceptance criteria.
- Identify test methods and use cases.
- Select users.
- Conduct testing.
- Evaluate results.